Man Dies Shortly After Being Cleared in '70s Murder

JACKSON, Miss -- A Mississippi man who spent more than 30 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit has died less than two months after his name was cleared in the case.

Bobby Ray Dixon died Sunday from cancer. He was 53. Jerry Dixon says he's glad his brother lived long enough to see himself cleared by DNA evidence in the 1979 rape and murder of a Hattiesburg woman.

In September, a circuit judge set aside the guilty pleas of Bobby Ray Dixon and another man in the slaying of Eva Gail Patterson after the Innocence Project New Orleans filed a petition on their behalf. The judge is expected to rule later on a posthumous petition for a third man, Larry Ruffin, who died in prison in 2002.